Street Hayarkon

Ilya Gefter

Lights - Ilya Gefter

In the exhibition “Lights”, that will open at Gallery Bernard on Thursday 18.4.2013 at 19.30 Ilya Gefter will present about 20 artworks from the last two years (2011-2013): oil paintings on canvas including landscapes and several portraits that gently trace various light conditions and emotional states. The show will be up until 17.05.2013

The landscape paintings are of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, places where Ilya lived and worked. The exhibited portraits are personal depictions of self and family members. In his recent works, Gefter strives to capture the moment of seeing and to balance its depiction between the uniqueness of momentary personal experience and the visual ideal of unchanging order and harmony.

“Although both light and shadow are present in the poetic cityscape depicting a segment of a mundane Israeli street in a common Israeli neighborhood, they are distilled beyond the specific description of an object and present the cyclic story of time, between dusk and night, past and present, and actually express the elusiveness of time. When Ilya paints a landscape – sometimes he tried to be allegedly objective, and sometimes he is being romantic or dramatic… According to Ilya, his creative process revolves between two poles: the intuitive pole and the intellectual one. It sometimes seems they fight one another and in other times they appear to live peacefully side by side.” writes Aya Lurie in the catalogue for Gefter’sshow at Golconda Gallery (2008)

Gefter paints from observation and also uses photographs. In his works he deals with the issues of space and experience of natural and artificial lights. “The light of a place is more important to me than the place itself” Gefter says. In his landscapes he addresses the experience of a particular location, time, light and atmosphere. But in each work he also paints himself. “A painting is myself, my experience of the surroundings I live in and my understanding of culture and art history. All that goes into a painting” Gefter says.